Information technologies (IT) such as distributed ledgers, AI and Big Data analytics are disrupting financial services markets and laying out new challenges and opportunities for regulators. They are also bound to improve information flows and processing within our economies main players, namely corporations. So much so that some claim that the role of boards will fundamentally change, shifting back from monitoring to advisory or losing relevance in favour of shareholder direct oversight of management.
The reports of the impending demise of monitoring boards, however, are greatly exaggerated. This is due both to new technologies' current and predictable limitations and to the inherent features of corporation governance and the agency problems between shareholders and their agents. While a refocus of boards on IT oversight and, in some areas, direct management is predictable and advisable, boards of directors will continue to play a key role in the control of agency costs within corporations. At the same time, they face increased liability risks in jurisdictions where duty of care violations are enforced.

About the speaker
Luca Enriques is the Allen & Overy Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law and a European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) Research Fellow. He is a coauthor of The Anatomy of Corporate Law (3rd ed., 2017) and of Principles of Financial Regulation (2016). He has published widely in the fields of corporate law, securities regulation, and banking law. He has held visiting positions, among others, at Harvard Law School, where he was Nomura Professor of International Financial Systems (2012-13), the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, the Instituto de Impresa (Madrid), and the Interdisciplinary Center Hertzliya. Between 2007 and 2012 he was a commissioner at Consob, the Italian securities market authority. Before joining the Oxford Faculty of Law, he was Professor of Law at the University of Bologna (2002-07) and at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome (2013-14), and a consultant to Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (2003-07).